Category Archives: British gardens

Vintage landscape: Bagatelle Garden (and Chelsea Miscellany)

Bagatelle/enclos*ure Hand-tinted (3″ x 5″) glass lantern slide of Bagatelle Garden, Paris, France, ca. 1930, photographer unknown.

Below: two details.

Bagatelle detail/enclos*ure

The image is from the Garden Club of America Collection, part of the Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian Institution (used here by permission).

Bagatelle detail/enclos*ure

The Archives hold over 60,000 photos and records documenting 6,300 historic and contemporary American gardens.  At its core are almost 3,000 hand-colored glass lantern and 35mm slides donated by the Garden Club of America.

Smithsonian Gardens maintains 11 gardens around the Smithsonian Institution’s grounds and also has a good blog here.

Chelsea Miscellany

It’s RHS  Chelsea Flower Show time!  Their website is here.

All The Telegraph’s  Chelsea coverage is here; The Guardian’s is here; The Independent’s is here.

BBC coverage is here.  You may need this to view it.  (View episodes soon; some expire in four days.)

The New York Times reports on how gnomes will be allowed in the show this year (only), here.  In the Herald (Dublin), “Diarmuid Gavin has branded the Chelsea Flower Show ‘dull’ and described Prince Harry’s garden at the centenary exhibition as ‘bad,’” here.

Studio ‘g’  has photos of the Best in Show winner — the Australian garden — here, and they promise more pictures to come.  Also, check out The Galloping Gardener’s report, here (thanks to GD by CM) — Gardenista’s, here – and The Enduring Gardener’s, here.   Anne Wareham of thinkinGardens comments on two of this year’s entries, here.

Sources for seeds for cow parsley — plant of the moment at this year’s show, according to Gardenista – here.

Instagram photos tagged #chelseaflowershow are here.  GAP Photos has 103 photos of Chelsea, here.  More photos, as well as plant lists, are posted on Shoot, here.

Where have you found good photos or reviews of the show?

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Filed under art, British gardens, culture and history, design, French gardens, garden design, garden writing, landscape, miscellany, nature, plants, vintage landscape, Washington, D.C., gardens

Nice arrangement of logs and sticks

Log arch at 2010 Malvern Show.  Photo by The Enduring Gardener.

I saw this photo on the blog The Enduring Gardener and thought of my parents, who had their forest thinned last fall, which left a lot of woody debris.  A simple metal frame holds the logs and sticks in place.

Are you currently cleaning up from a lot of winter tree damage?

This log arch was a display at the 2010 Malvern Spring Gardening Show in the U.K. The photo is © The Enduring Gardener, which is written by Stephanie Donaldson, Contributing Garden Editor of Country Living (U.K.) magazine. She also co-authored The Elements of Organic Gardening with the Prince of Wales.

Her blog’s “Inspiration” page has a lot of great photos of the Chelsea and Hampton Court garden shows.

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Filed under British gardens, design, garden design, landscape, nature, working in the garden

Vintage landscape: open-air school

Open-air school in London, Library of Congress“Children in chairs on lawn during afternoon rest, London County Open-air School.”

Open-air school, London, Library of Congress“Class on lawn, children in chairs, London Open-air School.”

Open-air schools in Europe and the U.S. were  part of an effort in the first half of the 20th century to combat the rise of tuberculosis.  The first — a waldeschule or forest school — was built near Berlin, Germany, in 1904.

An open-air school was created in England in 1907 by the London County Council. This may be the school pictured here.  A second London school was organized in 1908. By 1937, there were 96 open-air schools in Great Britain.

Photos and captions by Bain News Service via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (no dates provided).

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Filed under a garden in history, British gardens, culture and history, garden design, nature, vintage landscape

Wordless Wednesday: Oxford garden

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Chaplain’s Quadrangle garden enclosed by some of the oldest buildings (1470-1650) of Magdalen College, Oxford, September 2012.

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Wordless Wednesday: in London

London, old and new, from The Towerview across time from a window at the Tower of London, September 2012.

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Filed under a garden in history, architecture, British gardens, culture and history, design, landscape